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9/16/2012

Kemo Coliseum Monthly Progress : August

The August report of Kemo Coliseum is here! Giving my schedule, it's safe to say that the report will be around the second week of each month.

Quick summary for people who are new here. We have a Weekly Progress report in the secret lab section of our forum. The monthly reports will be a summary of those weekly reports, excluding the exclusive stuffs.

Anyway, let's continue with the report!

Game Status

My IRL work last month was pretty tough and demand a lot of my time, so I didn't have much time for the programming part of Kemo Coliseum. Fortunately, Mogmog wasn't as busy as me so we had some progress graphic design wise.

Game Design

Been playing other puzzle RPG games to learn more about the genre. Puzzle and Dragon is something that is very popular at the moment(Japanese AppStore only) but I don't find it fun since it doesn't have any strategy whatsoever. However, I've noticed that part of why it isn't fun is because every gem match essentially does the same thing : dealing damage to enemy.

This is similar to Kemo Coliseum, where 5 out of 7 types will deal damage to enemy. Hence I think there should be more reasons to aim at specific parts rather than stripping. We have discussed about this, and currently what we agree on is as follow:

Some characters, Agilo, for example, have skills that can aim at specific part. This should make deciding which part to destroy a more important decision to make.

Programming

+ Finished the circle meter for each armor part. Still need to link it with the actual stat of player.
+ Implemented the 'clearing board' that I mentioned last month.
+ Fixed the bug where the game recognizes some pattern as a match of straight 4 or more.

- Found a bug where if you make a match and then make a free swap then all hell break loose and kittens eat your children.

Also, tested the game on Android and it works without problems! Android tablet is getting cheaper and cheaper so I'm sure many people will be able to play it on Android. Porn on the go!

Arts

CG Sketch
Another Volga's sketch from NG is out!

Seems like someone is doing something to him down there ;)

Backgrounds
We were experimenting with turning a real photo into a game/anime liked background. Here are some of the results

There are other steps but the steps above are essential. The website says you can finish retouching an image in 10 to 20 minutes after you are used to it. This technique will really help a small team like us, considering a background artist is expensive and time consuming.

Next we tried adding the character to the background and tried to find the best way to put them together

■Background without character
We applied the same technique to the background.

■Character on blurry background
We found that when you put a character on a background, it becomes very hard to see and the character doesn't stand out that much. Blurring the background make it looks a lot better, now that the character stands out and it's easier to tell between foreground and background.

Considering this, we might have to prepare two versions of each background : normal one and blurred one. When there is no character present on the screen, we will use a normal version. We will then cross-fade to a blurred one once a character appear on the screen.

■Character on dark background
We also tested a dark background like in a room or cave with the character. It turns out that adjusting character graphic's contrast would make it look better. Hopefully this can be done through programming, otherwise we would have to prepare two version of character graphics.

Sub Characters Design

Here are the arts of some sub characters we were thinking about

Monkey
- Tharsix's master. Seeing that Tharsix is one of the strongest slaves he own, he told Tharsix to enter the tournament, promising him that he will let Tharsix go if he could win the tournament. We want an image of a clever but lazy middle-aged man, and a monkey sounds like a good fit for this kind of character.(No offense to any monkey lover!)

Boar
- The owner of weapons & armor store in town. He came from the land of the east and decided to settle here, where the tournament always bring him great amount of money. He'll be upgrading your weapon and armors. Or perhaps you could pay him with something else other than money ;-)

Squirrel
- She works at the information counter inside the coliseum. She'll be helping you with tutorial in the game, as well as giving you some information regarding the next opponent.

Wow. That was a long post. I didn't notice this when we report week by week. I often feel like we haven't done enough but putting it together like this reminds me that we do make some progress after all and it just feels great! (I still wish I could work more on programming though)

Donation Report

April $660

May $266
June $465
July $261
Aug $227

Thank you for all the donation! There were some discussions regarding game system and game settings in the forum which I will not disclose here. For those who donated and haven't visited the forum, please come and join us!

Again, if you have donated, doesn't matter how much, but still haven't gotten a link to the current build, please send an email to Dudedle Studio's email. I'll reply you with a link! I will only send it to every donator when there is a major update.

While Kemo Coliseum will be a game that is free to play, it is definitely not free to make. If you can, please help support us so we can keep working on the game, make it better, and finish it faster :)